brunch in D.C. has evolved to be little more than a way for the young urban elite (today’s yuppies) to make their messy weekends look neat, drunkenness hip, and materialistic desires something other than hedonistic.

After that highlight, the text got vague, with standard indictments of DC as being too white, too rich and too fake. Hoping for a polemic against a Washington institution deserving mockery, I put the iPhone down in disappointment. Do you even brunch, bro?

I have the misfortune of living off 14th Street. This once-gritty corridor, home to auto repair shops by day and hookers by night, has been refashioned as a temple of conspicuous consumption. Everything notorious about the strip is now gone, replaced by juiceries and micro-apartments.

A little after 1 PM on a Sunday, I saw a 20-something stumbling down the street. I was concerned. Was he sick? As he passed me, I saw. Raging drunk, in the middle of the day. The cause: brunch.

Despite my dislike of the sloppy DC brunch scene, I was recently forced to the meal. First ones in the restaurant but the manager insisted on squeezing us into a tiny booth, carefully packing us together like a puzzle of human parts. The objective: maximizing revenue out of an audience willing pay inflated prices for scrambled eggs.

The waiter kept pushing bottomless mimosas – “You just want one?” – confused by these strange people who didn’t want to get hammeringly drunk before noon.

Maybe if I was a morning person, I’d like brunch better. But I really don’t want talk to you before coffee. I don’t want to be social.

But brunch is all about the social, less about the food, and more about the Instagram. It doesn’t matter that you waited an hour for pancakes. What matters is how they look. And how you look, as you craft a social media persona to make your friends back home jealous. Fabulous! So totally Sex and the City! Even as the country slides toward a world that closely resembles Idiocracy.

Brunch is messy, careless and usually paid for with someone else’s money. No wonder Washington loves it so.

Stuff is messed up. With Trump in the White House, life in DC could end in a mushroom cloud.